RESERVE: An Energy-Efficient Edge Cloud Architecture for Intelligent Multi-UAV

With the increasing attraction of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil, public, and military applications, multi-UAV systems can perform environmental and disaster monitoring, border surveillance, and search and rescue. It is foreseen that these multi-UAV-based applications will be an important trend for edge computing scenarios. However, due to UAVs’ limited energy supplies as well as their continuous increase in the number of sensors, energy efficiency is a critical issue in multi-UAV systems. We believe that the fusion of edge computing and cloud computing can provide effective support for energy savings. This article presents an energy-efficient edge cloud architecture called RESERVE for intelligent multi-UAV. Under RESERVE, we study the energy-efficient computation offloading decision-making problem in a decentralized manner. The problem is formulated as a three-layer game in which the discretionary approach to reaching Nash Equilibrium is presented. Based on the proposed game, we design decentralized algorithms for two different cases. The algorithms can both achieve Nash Equilibrium. Furthermore, we propose a decentralized computation offloading mechanism and analyze the performance of the game by its efficiency ratio. We conduct simulation experiments and design a framework prototype. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed game methods can achieve more than 30 percent extra energy consumption reduction compared with the state-of-the-art decentralized algorithm and less than 10 percent performance loss relative to the centralized solution. The prototype framework we have developed proves the concept we propose.